Hey, Kids! Sausage! or: (One Hundred) Thirty Pieces of Silver

It’s almost Halloween, comics fans! So you want to see something really scary?

That’s the check. The check that Jack Liebowitz , publisher of National Allied Publications, doing business as Detective Comics, Inc., cut to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, for the rights to Superman. Forever. In perpetuity.

For a hundred and thirty clams. Or about two grand in today’s dollars. Which means that in Manhattan prices, they were paid about a case of beer, a carton of cigarettes and a week at the YMCA. In exchange for fucking Superman.

It’s easy to rail about how unfair and one-sided this deal was, and how Siegel and Shuster were screwed out of literally hundreds of millions of dollars based on this deal. But the fact of the matter is that they took the deal. They had a new idea – a dude in tights who could throw cars – that literally no one other than Detective Comics was willing to take a chance on. In exchange for taking that chance, Liebowitz demanded the complete and total rights to the character just in case it made any money… and the boys accepted. Oops.

Maybe Siegel and Shuster were hoping that, if Superman somehow became a hit, that the national corporation would be magnanimous and offer them ownership back. It’s nice to hope for things like that when you deal with a corporate entity, but like a wise man once said: “Lady, you knew I was a snake when you picked me up.”

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a comics fan just like we are, which means that there is pretty much a one-in-one probability that you’ve dreamed about making comics. And, like we talked about in our latest podcast, if you’re our age and grew up reading comics in the 1970s, you probably read Stan Lee’s Bullpen Bulletins in the back of Marvel Comics and pictured working in the Marvel Bullpen, probably as drawn by Fred Hembeck, where people had fun and goofed around and got along, all while getting to play with Spider-Man and Captain America.

But Stan Lee fucked off out of the House that Stan and Jack built back in the early 80’s, while Jack Kirby spent a lot of his final years suing that bullpen.

Look: I love comics. I also love sausage. Many of you love Apple Computers’ products. But for good or ill, they are made in a certain way, and sometimes it’s best to not think about it, or at least to be realistic about what’s behind that Fenway Frank. Or your iPhone. Or your Fantastic Four comic book.

And the fact of the matter is that, if you want to play with the Big Boys’ Toys, you need to play by their rules. And like most Big Boys, sometimes they are bullies. And if you don’t want to be bullied? Don’t take the fucking deal until it’s a deal you agree with.

The good news is that it’s not 1938 anymore. If you want to make comics, you aren’t beholden to any big publishing house. If you’re reading this, it’s safe to say that you have access to the Internet. And we here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives are living proof that any shitbag can buy a domain name and set up a working Web site literally on one Saturday morning with a hundred and fifty bucks and a crippling hangover. And now you don’t even need to worry about your readers looking at your stuff while tied to a computer.

So go make comics. Make great comics. Build your own audience. And then I hope some of you take that juice and make a good deal with one of the Big Two, because all of us want to see that kind of passionate creator playing with the characters that we love…

…and none of us like seeing any of them screwed.*

(*Well, other than Rob Liefeld. Seriously: fuck that guy.)

(via Comics Beat. Images via Gerry Duggan)